BENGALURU: It’s a big day for 23-year-old Sachin Bhatt whose years of hardwork will pay off today. The youngster’s work, a musical album in collaboration with Indian-British musician Soumik Datta, will premiere at the UN Climate Change Conference COP26 in Glasgow today. Called Songs of the Earth, the animation film — accompanied by an eight-track album — weaves issues like climate migration,
extreme weather, ocean pollution, deforestation and sustainable fashion.
Through an original narrative, songs and visuals, the 24-minute-long film follows the life of Asha, a young climate refugee from Bengal, as she searches for her missing father through the flood banks of Sundarbans delta, burning forests and melting polar ice caps. The film is a dedication to Global South (refers broadly to the regions of Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Oceania) and those who have been tragically displaced by environmental crises and natural disasters.
Along with Bhatt, Anjali Kama, his former classmate, worked with Datta to draw and digitally create the film. “I must have hand-drawn at least 250 images for this project in two months,” says Bhatt, adding, “It’s not my first time working with Datta. He found me on social media two years ago and I’ve been designing album covers and so on for him.”
For Songs of the Earth, Datta reached out to him two months ago for a job that generally requires 10 to 15 people. “We actually thought it would be impossible but the project was really interesting and I knew Kama would be able to help me out. So I’m in Bengaluru, Datta in London and Kama in Brooklyn...we worked close to 16 hours every day to make this happen,” says Bhatt, a graduate of Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology.
With Kama and Bhatt’s different styles of animation, it was a challenge to merge the two and bring out the final product, he says, adding, “I know Kama from college but we’ve never worked together. Everyone was very cooperative, so it was great,” he says. As the art director, Bhatt came up with a storyboard to get the look and feel of the music. The illustrators took up equal amounts of digital work to complete the project.
Last year, Bhatt worked on an animation for Javed Akhtar and Shankar Mahadevan’s song about Covid affecting the elderly. Bhatt says, “I guess subconsciously, working on social messages has become my forte now. However, I still work with other artistes for their music or any other digital projects.”